The Norman Conquest PDF

The Norman Conquest The last successful invasion of Britain was in 1066 (when the French-speaking Normans, ruled by William the Conqueror, invaded from France (they defeated the English at the battle of Hastings). 1066 was a crucial year of the Saxon King and for the history of England. In 1066 th...

The Norman Conquest The last successful invasion of Britain was in 1066 (when the French-speaking Normans, ruled by William the Conqueror, invaded from France (they defeated the English at the battle of Hastings). 1066 was a crucial year of the Saxon King and for the history of England. In 1066 the Anglo-Saxon King of England died without an heir. Two people claimed the Kingdom: Harold, The Earl of Wessex and William, The Duke of Normandy. Harold had himself crowned King but his position was not secure. By August 1066 William had assembled a force of about 5,000 knights for invasion. William defeated Harold at the Battle of Hastings (Oct 14, 1066). This resulted in profound political, administrative, and social changes in the British Isles. William was the illegitimate son of Robert I, duke of Normandy, by his concubine Arlette, a tanner’s daughter from the town of Falaise. The duke, who had no other sons, designated William his heir, and with his death in 1035 William became duke of Normandy at age seven. By the time he was 20, William had become an able ruler. After the Battle of Hastings, in 1066, he was crowned king of England. He never spoke English and was illiterate, but he had more influence on the evolution of the English language then anyone before or since. William ruled England until his death, on September 9, 1087, in Rouen, France. William was crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066. He and his nobles and their countrymen who kept coming over to England during the following 200 years imposed their Norman French on the country’s original Anglo- Saxon language. However, they could not suppress the English language. Communication went on in three languages: at the monasteries, learning went on in Latin; Norman-French was the language of the ruling class spoken at court and official institutions; but the common people held obstinately to their own mother tongue. Norman-French became the language of government and the era of feudalism and kingdom began. William III of Normandy (William the Conqueror) organized his English kingdom according to the feudal system which had already begun in England before his arrival. The lands of most of the Anglo-Saxons aristocracy were given to the Norman barons, and they introduced their feudal laws to compel the peasants to work for them. The English became the servile class. William the Conqueror gave land to nobles and knights in return for duty or service. No noble was stronger than the king himself. All land was owned by the king, but it was held by “vassals” (nobles, knights, freemen, etc.) in return for services. The Normans were not exactly gentle rulers, but the nation they created did pretty well. No one, for instance, has ever successfully invaded Britain since William’s time. Latin quickly displaced Anglo-Saxon as the language of government in the first few years after the conquest. The aristocracy mostly spoke French but had some fluency in English by the early 12th century, accentuated by the marriage of Norman and French incomers to Englishwomen. Some of the new language eventually worked its way down to the lower classes, where English was steadily marginalized as a written language, and traditional English names such as Aethelred were replaced by French-influenced ones like William. However, French always remained an aristocratic language. Unlike Latin, Anglo-Saxon, or Scandinavian, it had little impact on place-names. For the next 300 years three languages co-existed. The aristocracy spoke Norman-French; the ordinary people spoke English, while Latin was used in the church. Modern English evolved from the mingling of these three tongues. Norman-French and Anglo-Saxon were moulded into one national language only towards the beginning of the 14th century when the Hundred Year’s War broke out. The language of that time is called Middle English.  The Domesday Book William the Conqueror was the first English king who decided to count all the people in the country, as well as their property and land. In 1086 he sent his people across the country. They came to every family and asked many questions like: “How much land do you have? Who owns it? How much is it worth? How many ploughs and sheep have you got?” answering these questions people felt as if it was the Day of Judgment, or “doom”. That is why they called it the “Domesday Book” (a survey of entire population and their lands and property for tax purposes). Actually, it was the first economic survey, which helped the historians imagine how people in Britain lived in the XI-XII centuries For centuries afterward, the English elite was mostly French in descent, French in culture, and avidly engaged in French politics. Many English kings saw themselves first and foremost as French barons and were lords of extensive territories in France. England was deeply involved in French politics for centuries and open to French cultural tendencies— in language, religion, architecture, literature, and many other areas. This political and cultural orientation to Europe was accompanied by an economic orientation. The dominant English export was now wool. Wool continued to be the most important English export until the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century. The Conqueror’s fortress In the 1070s, William the Conqueror, fresh from his victory but nervous of rebellion, began to build a massive stone fortress in London to defend and proclaim his royal power. Nothing like it had ever been seen in England before. William intended his mighty castle keep not only to dominate the skyline, but also the hearts and minds of the defeated Londoners. The Tower took around 20 years to build. Masons arrived from Normandy, bringing with them stone from Caen in France. Most of the actual labour was provided by Englishmen. Medieval Towns Norman England participated in the general revival of European urban life in the 11th and 12th centuries. The 1087 Domesday Book listed 112 boroughs, or towns; most of the largest were built on old Roman sites. Medieval English towns were small by modern standards, or even compared to the great medieval cities of the East. London was clearly the largest city. Although there is no hard record of the total population of medieval London at any point in its history, and estimates by modern scholars vary widely, one common estimate is that the capital had a population of about 18,000 in 1100. Townspeople were a mixture of French and English. The Norman Conquest also led to the introduction of the first Jewish population in England since the Romans. The Jewish immigrants were French speakers from the Norman capital Rouen, and the medieval Jewish population of England remained Francophone. Jews originally settled in London. Beginning around the middle of the 12th century, they established small communities in other urban centers. The Jewish community was useful to the kings as moneylenders, and Jewish moneylenders also lent to private individuals. The law of the church forbade Christians from lending money at interest, so the Jews filled this economic need. However, Jews were increasingly targets of Christian anti-Semitism.  Britain in the Late Middle Ages (1200–1529) The period of the late Middle Ages in Britain was a testing time for the British social and political order, marked by war, civil discord, plague, and economic crisis. The island’s surviving rulers, the kings of England and Scotland, fought a series of bloody wars, which ensured the separate identity of Scotland for centuries to come, but at a cost of many deaths. The Reign of Edward I In Edward I (1239–1307; r. 1272–1307), England got its most competent king since William the Conqueror. A fine general, superb military organizer, and farsighted statesman, Edward was the first king of England since the conquest with an English name. The warlike Edward had an insatiable need for money and used parliaments as a means of raising it. Getting a group of community leaders together to accept a tax increase was actually easier than just trying to do it through royal fiat Edward’s greed led him to attack a vulnerable target: England’s Jewish population. In 1290 a series of measures aimed at gaining tighter royal control over Jewish wealth culminated in the expulsion of the Jews from England, the first such expulsion from a medieval European kingdom. Jews would not be allowed to live openly in England again until the mid-17th century. Some may have fled to Scotland, creating a Jewish community in that kingdom, but the history of Jews in Scotland before the modern era is very obscure, and the community would have been tiny. In their absence in England, Edward was able to turn to alternative sources of credit, such as the rising Italian banking houses. Lombard Street in London, for centuries thereafter the center of English banking, was originally named after the financiers from the Italian region of Lombardy who did business there. The subjugation of Wales was only the beginning of Edward’s program of expansion. Some years later, he seized the opportunity to realize an ancient English dream, the union of England and Scotland, when the adept Scottish king Alexander III (1241–86; r. 1249– 86) died and his granddaughter, the infant Margaret of Norway (d. 1290), was left as heir to the throne. Without a direct heir, there were several Scottish nobles descended from the royal house who could make a claim on the throne. Scottish leaders who feared civil war were willing to turn to the only possible person with the power and legal position to adjudicate the dispute: Edward I. The war between Scotland and England dragged on, but peace was eventually achieved in 1328. The Treaty of Edinburgh was a clear-cut victory for the Scots, as the English recognized that Scotland was a completely separate kingdom, free of any subjection to England. (The treaty was actually written in French, the common language of the English and Scottish aristocracy.) Edward III (1312–77; r. 1327–77) came to the English throne under a cloud due to the misfortunes of his father, Edward II. Edward III’s long reign was marked by the disaster of the Black Death, the beginnings of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, and the rise of Parliament as a governing institution. The Black Death In 1348, the bubonic plague arrived in Britain through the southern coast ports. Known as the Black Death, the disease was spread by fleas living in the fur of rats. The plague reached London by September 1348 and Scotland, Wales and Ireland in the winter of 1349. Between 10-30% of the population died. The plague returned periodically until the seventeenth century. The first few outbreaks severely reduced the fertility and density of the population. Poorer land was simply abandoned, and many villages were never re-occupied.